The Founder: Ottoman Çevrimiçi |link| -

His platform allowed volunteers in Tokyo, Berlin, or Chicago to view a scanned line of text and type its modern Latin-script equivalent (e.g., converting اشجع to eşcâ’ ). The founder’s genius lay in gamification: he turned transcription into a ranking system. Users earned "Pasha Points" for accuracy, reviewed by automated consensus algorithms. By 2012, 15,000 volunteers had transcribed over 2.3 million belgeler (documents)—a feat no state institution could match.

Thus, the concept of Osmanlı Çevrimiçi was born. Unlike the official state project Devlet Arşivleri , which focused on high-resolution scans for academics, Ersoy envisioned a crowdsourced, open-access, transliterated database. He founded the platform in 2006 from a two-room flat in Kadıköy, using three second-hand servers and a scanner he bought by selling his car. The founder’s core innovation was not the database but the OTR (Ottoman Transliteration Renderer) . Ottoman Turkish is notoriously difficult to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) due to its cursive, contextual nature (the letter kef changes shape depending on its neighbors). Ersoy rejected the industry standard of perfect OCR, which had a 40% error rate on divani script. Instead, he built a "human-in-the-loop" system. the founder: ottoman çevrimiçi

The precipitating moment occurred in 2004. Ersoy watched a student in Amsterdam instantly access a digitized medieval Dutch manuscript via a university portal. "Here," Ersoy later wrote in his blog, Bilişim Tarihçisi (The IT Historian), "the Dutch farmer's tax record is a click away, while the Ottoman Sultan’s imperial decree remains locked in a filing cabinet. This is not preservation; this is archival imprisonment." His platform allowed volunteers in Tokyo, Berlin, or

By 2020, the platform had digitized 10 million pages. But the founder refused to call himself a "CEO" or "Founder." His Twitter bio read simply: Müstensih (Copyist). The founder of Ottoman Çevrimiçi died unexpectedly in 2022 (hypothetical for this essay). However, his will contained a radical clause: he transferred the platform’s ownership to a non-profit trust based in Amsterdam and Istanbul, with a rotating board of historians, archivists, and software developers. Crucially, he forbade any future "paywall." He wrote: "An empire that ruled three continents for 600 years cannot be reduced to a subscription fee. Let the data flow like the waters of the Golden Horn." By 2012, 15,000 volunteers had transcribed over 2